If you’re forced to miss more than a few days of training, then you need to decide whether to try to catch up or revise your marathon goal. This decision will be influenced by how much time you missed, how long you’ve been preparing, and how many weeks are left until your marathon. Missing 2 1/2 weeks of preparation when you have 16 weeks to go is no big deal, but missing that amount of time during the last 2 months of preparation will likely require you to modify your goal.
Table 7.2 provides guidelines for when you may need to revise your goals after an injury or illness. Typically, if you’ve lost less than 10 days of training, then you can safely start back where you should have been on the schedules. If you’ve missed
O2max workouts, however, you may need to slow your pace during your next few
O2max sessions to reflect the lost time. If you’ve lost 10 or more days of training in the 8 weeks before your marathon, be open to revising your goal. When you resume full training, gather information from your timed sessions to get a sense of how much fitness you’ve lost and whether your marathon goal pace needs to be slowed by at least a few seconds per mile (per 1.6 km).
Making Up for Lost Time
In general, you’ll just have to deal with bad weather. Sometimes, however, Mother Nature dishes up a blizzard or blistering-hot weather that’s counterproductive to continued healthy training. If you can, find a treadmill indoors or choose an appropriate cross-training activity for a couple of days until the weather becomes bearable.
As with other factors influencing your marathon preparation, weather might necessitate some not-minor changes in your life. For example, you might need to alter your normal schedule during oppressive summer heat so that you can get in reasonable training early in the morning. Or if your area has been snowed under for weeks, you’ll probably need to find a few well-paved stretches where you can safely do multiple laps to get in your miles.
Try to anticipate weather when picking your marathon goal. If you don’t run well in the heat and live in a sultry climate, it makes little sense to plan for a September marathon because your hardest training will need to occur during the least conducive weather of the year. Similarly, Boston in April can be a tough goal if you live in an area where winter running is a daily challenge.
There’s really no excuse for outside commitments to regularly interfere with your marathon preparation. Put more gently, don’t set an ambitious marathon goal when you know the rest of your life will be busier than usual. Once you’ve picked your marathon and have decided how long you’ll prepare for it, try to anticipate and eliminate factors that would significantly interfere with your training.
Of course, regardless of how focused you are on your training, you’re going to have the occasional day when meeting your training goal is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. A sick child, an unsympathetic boss, or a traffic accident all have a way of dashing plans for a high-quality tempo run. If necessary, juggle the days in the training schedule you’re following so that you get in the most important workouts while still allowing for adequate recovery. A good rule of thumb is that if you can do 90 percent of the planned training schedule, then your preparation is going well.
The training schedules in the following chapters are based on the classic stress/recovery principle of adaptation. That is, all runners need easy days after their key training sessions before they’re ready to benefit from more hard work. Many older runners find that they need more of those easy days between long or fast workouts than their younger counterparts.
Because there’s such great variance in how quickly masters runners recover, we’re reluctant to offer hard-and-fast recommendations on how to adjust the schedules for age. After all, a runner in her early 50s who has been running for 5 years probably has fresher legs than a man in his 50s in his third decade of running. What we can say to our older readers is to pick which schedule to follow based on a sound assessment of your current capabilities rather than memories of how you could train in your glory days. That might mean aiming for a lower peak mileage, and it almost certainly means taking it very easy on your recovery days. You might find that you can better hit the key workouts – the long runs, the medium-long runs, the tempo and marathon-pace runs – by substituting cross-training for running on some recovery days. (See chapter 4 for more on this approach.)
If, after making these adjustments, you’re still too tired to do the key sessions in the correct intensity range, then add in extra recovery days. You could, for example, convert the 12-week schedule into a 14-week schedule, thereby getting in the important workouts but spreading the stress over a longer buildup.
Older marathoners should pay special attention to the section in chapter 3 on accelerating recovery. We can well attest that less-than-ideal choices about training, stretching, diet, sleep, and so on take far more of a toll now than they did when we were in our late 20s. If you want to continue to aim high as a marathoner in middle age and beyond, we salute you. Maximize your chances of success by consistently doing the little nonrunning things that younger runners often ignore.
Now that we’ve looked at the principles behind successful marathon training and racing and how to implement those principles, let’s get to what you probably care most about – the training schedules, which constitute the rest of this book.
Chapter 8
Marathon Training on Up to 55 Miles (88 km) per Week
This chapter is for runners who typically train less than 40 miles (64 km) per week but who are willing to up their mileage to 55 miles (88 km) per week during marathon preparation. It includes two schedules: an 18-week schedule that starts at 33 miles (53 km) per week and a 12-week schedule that starts at 35 miles (56 km) per week. Each of these schedules increases weekly mileage progressively to a peak of 55 miles (88 km).
As discussed in chapter 1, it’s useful to divide your overall training schedule into phases, called mesocycles. The training schedules consist of four mesocycles that focus on endurance, lactate threshold and endurance, race preparation, and tapering, respectively. A final schedule, which contains a 5-week postmarathon recovery program, can follow either of the training schedules.
Of the two training schedules presented in this chapter, we recommend the 18-week schedule for most situations. Eighteen weeks is plenty of time to stimulate the necessary adaptations to improve your marathon performance. At the same time, 18 weeks is short enough that you can focus your efforts without becoming bored with the process.
At times, however, you simply don’t have 18 weeks to prepare for your marathon. The 12-week schedule includes the same mesocycles as the 18-week schedule, but because of the short time for preparation, each of these mesocycles is abbreviated. If you go into a marathon in a rush, you must realize that your preparation won’t be as thorough as if you had longer to prepare. The 12-week schedule takes into account that sometimes circumstances don’t allow you the optimal length of time for preparation and strives to provide a compact yet effective training program.